Japan’s Nuclear Nightmare; Is any Nuclear Plant Safe?

As the situation at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant grows more uncertain and more dire with each passing hour, as residents of of the Bay Area check plume paths and stock up on potassium iodide (which they won’t need) it is important to take a step back and understand what has happened to one of our nation’s most important allies in the past few days.

The earthquake, as powerful as it was, caused significant but not catastrophic damage to Japan. A country that has been rocked with devastating quakes for centuries — how soon we have forgotten that over 6,000 people lost their lives in the Kobe earthquake of 1995 that also caused over $100 billion in damage — knew how to build its buildings to withstand a quake and how to respond to a quake-caused mass disaster. The damage from the quake of March 11th would have probably been contained to the more remote and less densely populated towns and villages closest to the epicenter, and even then, the tweets coming from those areas in the immediate aftermath indicated that people were pretty much riding out a large, but scary, earthquake.

The tsunami, however, overwhelmed everyone’s predictions. Sea walls were mere speed bumps to the ten, twenty, thirty foot walls of water that clearcut everything in their path. As we saw in 2004, coastal villages simply disappeared under a burial mound of mud and debris. And like the great tsunami of 2004, the death toll is just scratching the surface and the rebuilding effort in Japan will take many years and hundreds of billions of dollars to complete. I’m not sure northern Honshu will ever be quite the same again.

In the earthquake, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant’s alarms tripped a shutdown, as it should. But the tsunami — the wild card — wiped out its backup systems, and there the trouble began.

The potential catastrophe at the nuclear plant is now being blamed, in part, on a combination of poor planning, judgment, response, and information from the plant owner, TEPCO, and the seemingly clueless Japanese government. The lack of extraordinary action a situation like this demands has forced the United States to take the equally extraordinary step of disagreeing with its close ally on the severity and risks associated with Reactors 4 and 3. Indeed, Japan initially pooh-poohed our assessment that the spent-rod cooling tank on Reactor 4 is dry (I’m guessing verified by our spy satellites) in favor of continuing to focus on Reactor 3 — probably because Reactor 3 has reprocessed uranium, better known as plutonium, which is deadlier on a magnitude that we can’t possibly understand. Still, why not attack both with equal vigor?

Experts are sayint that the helicopters and water cannons should have been in place days ago. The military should have been mobilized immediately. Advisers from the International Atomic Energy Agency should have been invited in once it was clear the back-up pumps and generators were down. The possibilities of damage to the spent-rod cooling pools should have been anticipated. The worst-case scenarios obviously were either not recognized or ignored in favor of assuming the least likely amount of damage. For a country and a people who were the first (and hopefully last) victims of an atomic bomb, the lack of an aggressive response to the reports that came filtering in on Fukushima is puzzling, at best. For the millions of Japanese people potentially in harm’s way, the response is becoming unforgivable.

Some commentators have blamed this on Japanese consensus model of decision-making slowing down the reaction time. Others are just as inclined to blame the fact that for the first few days it was a corporate-run disaster responses, since no one seemed to blame either American or British culture for the BP’s initial nonchalant attitude towards the Deepwater Horizon horion, and no one cited any unique American characteristic for the lackluster response to Hurricane Katrina. Perhaps it is just human nature to downplay a problem and hoping it solves itself. No one likes to cry wolf, perhaps. But the hope and pray method didn’t work in the Gulf, and when nuclear material is involved, if definitely shouldn’t be part of the response manual of any responder. When nuclear materials are involved, better to be safe than sorry, but that mantra hasn’t hit either governments or the corporate boardroom. It is a testament to this inertia of idiocy that it was not until yesterday that an American nuclear “swat” team was invited to assist Japan — a few days late and a few damaged reactors short.

I used to be a believer in “safe” nuclear technology. I saw the renaissance of nuclear plants as a means to combat global warming (please restrain the hysterical giggling at this point). After Fukushima, and in reflection on the history of nuclear power plants, I have changed my mind. For me, until someone can create a nuclear plant that is 100% immune to operator error, 100% immune to equipment failure or malfunction, 100% immune to terrorist attack and 100% immune from natural disaster, I can’t in good conscience support it any more. When something bad happens at a nuclear plant, it is very, very, bad. You can stand next to an oil slick, or a refinery fire, and try to ascertain the best way to deal with a problem. You can stand next to a ruptured gas line. You can cap an undersea well. (Understand, I am not a supporter of increased drilling, just making a relative comparison here) But as the news reports from Fukushima come in, the bubble of lethal radiation around Reactors 3 and 4 could make it impossible to even send workers — except on a suicide mission — to contain the damage. And even if they are successful — and we all pray they do — it seems clear that this area of Japan may be off-limits to human habitation for a very, very long time.

When you think about it, the principles behind a nuclear reactor haven’t changed much since Enrico Fermi activated the world’s first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction under a stadium in Chicago in 1942. Control rods are used to ensure that the chain reaction does not get out of hand. Everything else just seems to be about ensuring that the deadly radiation emanating from nuclear fission is shielded and controlled.

As humans, we now build containment shields, backup pumps and generators to ensure that the unthinkable is impossible. But the problem is, as has been demonstrated at Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and now Fukushima — not to mention the dozens of close calls at other facilities around the world — the unthinkable is very possible indeed. Until and hopefully including now, we have been relatively lucky to escape mass disaster. But, inevitably, luck runs out.

We have not yet invented a “magic bullet” that can instantly stop or arrest the nuclear process, or absorb its deadly radiation and convert it into something harmless. And as Fukushima and our own battle over Yucca Mountain demonstrates, we haven’t even figured out what to do with the spent but still highly radioactive nuclear rods leftover from the nuclear process.

From a technological standpoint, we are still children playing with a lit stick of dynamite and a fire extinguisher. It is the height of hubris to say we “control” nuclear technology. We know how to make a bomb, and we know how to make a nuclear reaction not result in a bomb, but that’s about it. At best, we have managed to partially tame it, but its pernicious, lethal nature is something we have yet to control.

Yes, in this case the tsunami overwhelmed the fail-safes built into the system. But a tsunami didn’t cause Chernobyl. A tsunami didn’t create the crisis at Three Mile Island. If it isn’t one thing, it could be another — the point is, as I said before, when it goes bad, it goes bad in a way exponentially worse than we want or care to imagine.

If the government and private industry want to invest in innovation — if they sincerely believe that nuclear power is an answer to global warming and ending our reliance on fossil fuels — then investment should not be directed at how to build better nuclear reactors, but in the science of the nuclear reaction. When we can say, perhaps, that we have the knowledge and the means to reverse fission and transmute gamma rays into the infrared, then we can say that the end of the nuclear nightmare is at hand. As it is, for all our protestations to the contrary, we are fumbling and feeling our way down a narrow precipice in the twilight, with nothing less than the future of the human race, and our planet, in our lead-gloved hands.

IF YOU WANT TO HELP: The Japanese Cultural and Community Center of Northern California has set up a relief fund where 100% of the proceeds will go towards the people of Japan. Click on this link.